10 Ways to Fix Broken Corporate Recruiting Systems

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Instead, give a job-seeker a picture of himself or herself in action in your shop: "In our natural-foods business, getting sales leads from the trade show floor to our inside sales reps is a huge priority for us and requires a mix of intelligent process and great one-on-one communication. If you like building nimble processes as much as you like on-the-phone problem solving, we'd love to talk with you." Lose the governmental death-language and speak to job-seekers the way we speak to our friends. That makes our ads easier to read and brands us as human beings to boot. Eureka.

5. Give Hiring Managers More Autonomy

A hiring manager knows what he or she needs. It makes sense for that person to have principal responsibility for the hiring process. Every manager and every department has its own quirks and culture. Sure, we should use our HR experts to look after the long-term growth of the organization and its people. But hiring managers should own the recruiting process for their groups—after all, who cares about making a great hire more than the person responsible for the team's results? HR people are sick of being the recruiting bad guys. Corporations should empower hiring managers to cultivate talent pools and dip into them as needed. HR experts can help them build their pipelines and promote talent-sharing among groups. At the same time, we need to dismantle the hidebound recruiting processes that puts up unnecessary gates between talent on the hoof and jobs we desperately need filled.

6. Forget the "I Worked at Burger King in 1986" Admission

There is no earthly business reason for every job-seeker to tell us about every job he's ever held, share every supervisor's name from their past, and recount every job task and duty they've held. What we really should ask candidates, we don't: Things like "What did you leave in your wake in that job?" and "What improvements would you make to our website?" We need to lose the 1940s-era mentality that must know where you worked, when, and for whom. That's goofy. If we're targeting our future talent where they already congregate and simultaneously building communities of talent to fill our pipeline, the need for a data-and-soul-sucking corporate career portal goes away. If your customers had to jump through these tedious hoops to do business with your company, would they do it? Not on your life.

7. Rely on Your Tribe

When I ask corporate HR leaders why they don't make more use of their employee referral programs, they usually tell me, "Our employees' friends are slackers" or "Our employees don't bring us their friends—we've tried." Those are incredibly lame excuses. Our employees, vendors, and customers are our best sources of talent, or they would be if we kept them in the loop and made them part of the process. When the friend-of-an-employee intake process amounts to "Leave your friend's résumé in that tray over there" and the referring employee has no more visibility into the selection process than the man in the moon, the system is broken. We can create talent evangelists in our companies. The co-workers who know talented people we don't are as valuable as gold. Are we including them in our recruiting strategy or pushing them to the periphery and telling them to butt out of our recruiting activities?

8. Court, Don't Interrogate

When I teach new-millennium recruiting practices, participants often say, It's tough to weed through candidates to find the qualified ones. I ask them, "In the résumé-screening stage, you mean?" and they say, "No, in the interview." Our organizations will never get the people we need in the pipeline and keep them there until we drop the idea that recruiting is primarily a matter of vetting candidates. The truly talented folks who move their employers' numbers are people who won't sit still to be vetted to death.